If your account is currently achieving a return on ad spend (ROAS) of 5, and your goal is to achieve a ROAS of 6, your strategy should focus on efficiency optimizations to improve ROAS. If your account is achieving a ROAS of 5 and your goal is to increase revenue as long as your ROAS is at or above 4 (and you have additional budget to spend), then your strategy will need to focus on growth initiatives.
Strategy is more than a bundle of cultivated tactics. When we onboard a new client, we have a whole arsenal of tools to use and reports to run that help us understand the account better. It is easy for us to pat ourselves on the back and say “this is a good strategy for learning the account!” Pardon my language when I say: That ain’t no heckin’ strategy.

Say your e-commerce site focuses on college students. Target promotions to local coffee shops within a couple miles of your store front that students frequent. Students that bring in a receipt from the coffee shop to your brick and mortar store get a special discount. You can push this email campaign to users that are within a 10 mile radius of the coffee shop and your store.

In order to get more specific with our audience, we set up our targeting to focus on those people that Facebook says are interested in moving. We narrow our age range slightly to exclude those too young to (probably) be looking to sell their home, and also include some demographic and behavioral targeting traits. We target those who are “likely to move” and those within a range of incomes and net worths that we like:
One way to get a good idea of how your target market might view your industry is to just ask them. Using focus groups, questionnaires, and surveys can help you can gather information on popular businesses with products similar to your own. You’ll also get first-hand information of how customers feel about the products that are already on the market.
It is crucial to separate business and personal finances – and to be very prudent in the first few years of running your business, especially when you start making profit. Keep tight record, develop regular forecasts, avoid overdrafts, watch interest rates, keep track of expenses, bank all income, self-fund if possible and check bank statement regularly. Re-invest your profits into the growth and development of the business, the reward will be well worth the investment.
Another easy, yet possibly expensive, way of testing geo-location is using a PPC platform such as AdWords. You can set your campaign targeting to very specific locations and languages, as well as set the destination URLs of your individual ads. Similarly, this will require a set of landing pages for each campaign, but delivers results very quickly. You may be able to run a fast, data rich, and location-based conversion analysis with little more.
Now as searchers start to gather information, they begin to refine their search and start using more specific terms. Then finally they begin to use very specific terms. They have switched from information gathering to a transactional mode. If someone searches on the term “canon eos mark III,” what does that suggest about their intent? That they have done their research and are ready to buy. So do you send them to your home page? Absolutely not. You need to send them to your product page that has the product, its features, maybe related products, the price, and most importantly the “buy now” button. They don’t need more information; they’re probably price shopping and are looking for a trusted source with the best price.
Long tail keywords are longer word phrases. They are specific phrases searchers are more likely to use when doing a specified search. Due to the more tailored nature of long tail keywords, it is important to create a theme around these phrases. Doing so will increase your business’ rank in search engine results. A generic single keyword is not as valuable as multiple keywords that match a user’s search. In short, long tail keywords prove that, as far as B2B SEO goes, less is not always more. Once you’ve compiled a list of “long tail keywords” that describe a certain theme, you can begin conducting your keyword research.

Attribution. Use attribution data to prove the influence of PPC on conversions either cross-channel or within the channel. For instance, you might learn that certain campaigns don’t convert well, and the instinct is to turn them off. However, if they lead to conversions in other campaigns, you’ll want to allocate budget to keep the conversion path open.

We at SEMrush continuously monitor Google’s updates, as the search engine rarely stands still. While testing the updates that are most likely to impact advertisers, we have come to the conclusion that Google is moving in the direction of “autopiloted” campaigns. The message is clear, the more you delegate to Google Ads’ artificial mind - bids, placements, banner sizes, etc. - the more benefit you and your customers will get from the campaign.
The Keyword Planner is a free tool, but you'll need to set up a Google AdWords account first if you don't have one already. Once you're set up and logged in, go to the Tools bar at the top of the home page and you'll find the Keyword Planner there. Click Search for new keyword and ad group ideas. You'll be able to see suggestions in both the Ad group ideas tab and the Keyword ideas tab. You can add new keywords to an ad group by clicking the double arrows >> next to the keyword or remove them by clicking on the ad group and then the X next to that keyword.
These days, organic SEO is all about creating the highest quality content that is actionable and informative around a specific topic. While your content will no doubt contain keywords referencing said topic in places like heading tags and body copy, search engines are well-versed at filling in gaps about content topics without needing to be bludgeoned by keywords. Keyword research can never—and should never—be used as a crutch for poor content quality. However, exercises like those described below, can play very important roles in helping you define and measure your content strategy as well as mapping your content topics to real users’ needs. Words matter.
Before you begin, you’ll need to identify six brands to compare your website against. These should be your search competitors (who else is ranking for terms that you’re ranking for, or would like to rank for?) in addition to a business competitor (or two). Don’t know who your search competition is? You can use SEMRush and Searchmetrics to identify them, and if you want to be extra thorough you can use this Moz post as a guide.
You’ve probably been hearing more and more about retargeting in the couple of years or so, and for good reason too. Retargeting campaigns use cookies to keep track of the internet users who visit your site so that you can continue to market to them once they leave. Have you ever shopped for an item and then suddenly noticed it following you around on other sites? That’s retargeting. And believe it or not, it really works.

A competitive analysis won’t help you with pressing business decisions, such as what product feature to build next. (Never copy your competitors for the sake of it; they could be 100% winging it!) Moreover, if you’re the industry leader, the value of analyzing competitors is limited because you’re the one leading the pack through uncharted territory.

You’ve probably been hearing more and more about retargeting in the couple of years or so, and for good reason too. Retargeting campaigns use cookies to keep track of the internet users who visit your site so that you can continue to market to them once they leave. Have you ever shopped for an item and then suddenly noticed it following you around on other sites? That’s retargeting. And believe it or not, it really works.
As with any Split or Multivariate testing, modification of the visual elements can make a big difference. Similarly, testing different design elements based on the visitor’s location may enlighten about the funnel you’re testing. The way bright colors are interpreted by one culture on side of the planet may be vastly different to another. Think of holiday themes as an example, or national flags as another.
Some websites regard visitors in different ways. For example, blogs are not as concerned with their visitor type, so long as they are drawing in visitors. In short, having an audience matters more than who makes up the audience. A business website, on the other hand, is looking for a certain type of traffic. This traffic should come from your target market. To make this happen, creating a keyword theme is necessary.

L’Oreal did something similar when it used geolocation technology to create a virtual art exhibit that allowed attendees to uncover the art and feel as though they were right there looking at it. Brands can also use geolocation technology in mobile apps that include gamification aspects to engage a user more fully in a particular product or service.

Export the weighted list back to your spreadsheet and combine it with the others in Excel. Then use the data tools to sort the list by ‘Priority’ – this is a score based on the difficulty, traffic, opportunity and your score. This tells you which keywords you should be targeting in descending order of attractiveness. Suddenly, you’ve turned more than 1,000 keywords into a usable list of a few dozen. Using the same example for wines:

Once you have caught the attention of people with your ad and they click on it, you want to make sure that you direct them to a customized landing page that specifically relates to what they just clicked on. Many small businesses make the mistake of sending them to their website homepage, but this isn’t the best tactic to convert visitors. Instead, you need to design landing pages that reflect the keywords from the PPC ad, show the product or service solution that your new visitors were searching Google for, and have a prominent, clear call to action like “Book Now” or “Buy Now”.

The distinctions here can become quite urgent depending on the kind of product you’re selling or the kind of customer you’re looking to find. If you’re trying to find people who are interested in selling their homes in the East Village, then you don’t want to target people who are just in the East Village on their spring break or while visiting family. If you’re trying to target high net worth individuals on vacation in Montauk, New York because you believe they’re ripe targets for ads about buying beachfront houses in Montauk, then you don’t want to waste your ad spend showing ads to locals.

Using SKAGs will help you improve your overall quality score, which will also improve the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns. In order to get the best possible quality score, you need to make sure that your user experience is consistent. For instance, your ad, keyword, and landing page should all match and seamlessly flow together. This is why using just one keyword per ad group is so helpful. It allows you to ensure that your ad and landing page perfectly align with the ad keyword. If you use multiple keywords, especially more than 15, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to thoroughly represent all those keywords in your ad and landing page.

The secondary and tertiary groups are both your indirect competition.Their products may not be the same as yours, but could satisfy the same need or solve the same problem. You should primarily focus on your direct competitors, but you should watch your indirect competitors. These businesses may move into another group as your business, or theirs, grows and expand product offerings.
It’s important to classify your keywords. You should distinguish your most important high level keywords, the ones that have sufficient traffic for your business and connect the best to your business. These are usually more “head” than “tail”. You should only have a few of these keywords for your business. The rest of it are bound to be more down the tail. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go read up on long tail keywords.
Once your ad is displayed, it’s likely to be clicked by only a tiny percentage of people who search for such a broad term, making it less likely to be displayed in the future. And even if you create an ad that’s broad enough for those searchers to reliably click, they’re unlikely to find exactly what they’re looking for on your landing page. You’re paying a lot for poor-quality traffic.
Has anyone tried to use Changetower (https://changetower.com) to monitor for new competitive keyword changes? I can seem to figure out a way to monitor for specific keywords that my clients wants to get alerted for, just general changes or changes in a certain area of the page… If anyone knows anything about Changetower or another site to recommend for monitoring keywords? Thanks!
A first step is to try to articulate what market it is that you serve. Who are the customers in this market and what problem, need or want are they experiencing? Which organisations are currently satisfying these needs or wants and how do these organisations differ? If there are multiple products tailored to different market segments try to define the ways in which these products can be grouped together or set apart. Using simple 2×2 matrices (e.g. price vs. functionality) can help to categorise your competitors and help to show what customers are looking for.
The best way to see what geotargeting can do for your company is to undertake a test campaign on a site like Facebook employing the parameters that would best access your target audience in various parts of the country. Include the specified area(s) within the ad’s content and launch it to see how it impacts results at your various locations and your online business. From there, you can further expand on what the technique can do, even using it as a recruitment tool to locate new marketing talent to run your next geotargeting campaign.
Once you've done your research, you want to make sure you're incorporating it into your content marketing strategy every step of the way. One of the best ways to keep yourself and your team on track is to use a tool that's already integrated with your marketing automation platform. This will give everyone visibility into what keywords your team is using, how they're using them and how your content is performing.

Monitoring also allows you to notice trends. If there’s a high bounce rate (people leaving your landing page before making a purchase) but a high click-through rate as well (lots of people are clicking on your ad), it’s a sign that the issue isn’t with your ad but with your landing page. Instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, you can focus exclusively on improving your landing page.

But consider this: only a lead who is in the early stages of researching a product or solution (aka not ready to convert) uses such general keywords in their search engine research, simply because they aren’t yet educated enough about what they’re looking for. Similar to a negative keyword strategy, bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) keywords can help you reach avoid the wrong leads. These keywords are ones that are more pricing and service-oriented, which will bring in consumers who have a higher potential of converting as a result of your PPC ads.

By looking at them from a customer’s point of view, you are looking at their major strengths and flaws. In other words, you are doing the first part of the SWOT analysis. You think like a customer would. Why would a customer go for their services? Is it because they do things differently or their quality is top notch? Either way these things are like strengths for the competitors. You put yourself in the customer’s shoes and wonder why you would go for them instead of coming to your own company.
Comparative user testing to the rescue: you ask the participants to evaluate your website as well as the websites of your top 2 competitors. To avoid biased feedback, try not to disclose which company you are with, and mix up the order in which you show the websites to the participants. Not to overwhelm the participants, limit the number of websites to 3 per person.
Online pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows almost anyone to create ads. Each time your ad pops up online and someone clicks on it, you pay a small fee. PPC advertising appears in search engines like Google or Bing and on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. The point of PPC is to get fresh visitors to discover your business online.
Geo-targeting in the most traditional sense uses IP addresses to figure out where users are. Every internet-connected device has a unique IP. It’s like an address for your computer, tablet, phone, or wearable. The first three digits provide a country code. The digits after that indicate specific areas within a country, down to state, city, and postal code. To learn more about the tech behind geo-targeting, geoedge.com is a good source.
As a start-up, you likely have a lot of competition in your industry. This means that you need to stay organised in order to keep ahead of the curve. By being more organised, you will be able to meet client briefs on time and keep to your schedule. Organisation is important for your start-up because it saves you time, stops you from procrastinating and keeps your employees on track. With improved customer service due to your efficiency, you will soon find your business growing in leaps and bounds.
Example 2: If your goal is B2B marketing and relations, your keyword(s) should have a revenue spin. For example, if your business sells software for eCommerce, your keywords would focus on that. Your concept might sound something like this: “the best software for B2B marketing and eCommerce.” You would then create a keyword theme around this concept, leading to use of the keyword or phrase for B2B SEO. This specific keyword concept is more likely to attract your target audience of B2B marketers and companies.

Great insight here. This template is meant to serve as a base for further customization. Feel free to build on top of it with metrics and data that you find useful, I would love to see what you come up with. You can actually configure the backlink gap analysis to run for majestic or ahrefs by adjusting the query formula slightly. You bring up a great point about analyzing link data from multiple sources to get a more accurate picture so I would definitely recommend exploring majestic and ahrefs data as well..